Expiration Date

by Tim Powers

“So how do I do it, then, if you’re so smart?”

  “Edison, don’t—” said Elizalde quickly—

  But Kootie’s mouth was already open, and with it Edison said; “I already told you—cross your eyes and spit.”

  And now the one-armed man was doing just that. His eyes crossed until the irises had half disappeared in the direction of his nose, as if the pupils might touch each other behind his nose, and his mouth opened wide.

  The barrels of the stumpy shotgun lifted and swung back and forth, and Sullivan pressed himself back against the kitchen counter. He glanced at Kootie, who just shrugged, wide-eyed.

  It was as if the one-armed man had a speaker surgically implanted in his larynx—men’s angry voices, crying children, laughing women, a chaotic chorus was shouting out of his lungs.

  He might have been trying to spit. His lower jaw rotated around under his nose, and his tongue jerked—and finally one of the voices, a woman’s, shrill and jabbering as if speeded up by some magical Doppler effect, rose and became louder and clearer.

  And the one-armed man spit—and then gagged violently, convulsing like a snapped whip—

  —As a glistening red snake shot out of his mouth. It was smoking even before it slapped heavily onto the floor, and the instant reek of ammonia and sulfur was so intense that Sullivan, who had involuntarily recoiled from its abrupt appearance, now involuntarily flinched from its fumes. And a chilly, laughing breeze punched past him and instantaneously buckled the blinds and shattered out the window.

  Everyone was moving—Kootie had leaped from the counter and was colliding with Elizalde out on the floor in the direction of the broken window and the .45, the red snake-thing was slapping and hopping in front of the one-armed man, who was hunched forward with a rope of drool swinging from his mouth, and Sullivan made himself push off from the kitchen counter and vault over the spasming snake-thing to kick the hand that held the chopped shotgun.

  Both shells went off, with a crash like a far-fallen truck slamming through the ceiling. Sullivan had jumped with no thought of anything beyond kicking the gun, and the air compression of the shotgun blasts seemed to loft him further—his knee cracked the one-armed man’s head and then Sullivan’s shoulder and jaw hit the bedroom doorframe hard, and he bounced off and wound up half-kneeling on the floor.

  The room was full of stinging haze, and through squinting, watering eyes he could see Elizalde and Kootie. They were up, moving, opening the front door, in the ringing silence of stunned eardrums. Unable to breathe at all, Sullivan crawled around the wet red snake, which was already splitting and falling apart, and scuttled painfully on his hands and knees toward the daylight and the promise of breathable air. His hands bumped against Houdini’s plaster hands, and he paused to grab them—but they disappeared when he touched them.

  He hopped and scrabbled out through the door into the fresh air, rolling over the doorstep onto his back on the chilly asphalt. The breeze was cold on the astringent sweat that spiked his hair and made his shirt cling to him.

  Nicky Bradshaw, wearing a sail-like Hawaiian shirt, was standing on the sidewalk, looking down at him with no expression on his weathered old face. Behind Bradshaw were two tensely smiling men in track suits—and each of them held a semiautomatic pistol.

  Some kind of the new 9-millimeters, Sullivan thought bleakly; Beretta or Sig or Browning. Ever since Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, everybody’s crazy about 9-millimeters. He looked down past his belt buckle, and saw Elizalde slowly crouching to place his old .45 on the pavement, watched closely by another of the smiling, trendily armed young men.

  Sullivan’s nostrils twitched to a new smell—the burning-candy reek of clove-flavored cigarettes. And when a woman’s voice spoke, barely audible over the ringing in his ears, Sullivan didn’t even need to look to know whose it was. She had, after all, been his boss for eleven years.

  “I’m glad they’ve come without waiting to be asked,” said Loretta deLarava. “I should never have known who were the right people to invite! Cuff ’em all,” she added, “and get ’em into the truck, fast. Nicky and Pete I recognize, and this must be the famous Koot Hoomie Parganas, found at last—but I want all of them. Get anybody who’s inside. Find Pete’s van, and search it and this apartment for my mask. You know what to look for.”

  Sullivan at last rocked his head around to look up at her. Pouches of pale flesh sagged under her bloodshot eyes, and her fat cheeks hung around her sparking cigarette in wrinkly wattles.

  “Hi, stepmother,” he gasped, hardly able to hear his own voice. He hadn’t wanted to speak to her, or even look at her, but it was important to let the ghost of his father know who this was. He wasn’t sure how well the ghost could see, and in any case Loretta deLarava didn’t look anything like the Kelley Keith of 1959.

  deLarava frowned past him, sucking hard on the cigarette, and didn’t reply.

  On one of the second-floor balconies, a white-bearded man in jeans and a T-shirt was looking down at this crowd in alarm. “Sol!” he yelled. “What’s going on? Was that a gunshot? What’s that terrible stink?”

  “You’re the manager here, Nicky?” said deLarava quietly. “I don’t want your people to get hurt.”

  Bradshaw squinted up at his alarmed tenant. “Health-code enforcement,” he grated. “Stay inside. These new renters have some kind of. Bowel disorder.”

  “Jesus, I’ll say!” The man disappeared from the balcony, and Sullivan heard a door slam.

  More by vibration in the pavement under his back than by hearing, Sullivan became aware of someone else striding up now, from the direction of the street. “Ms. deLarava?” a man said brightly. “My name is J. Francis—” The voice trailed off, and Sullivan knew without looking that he had noticed the guns. “I’m an attorney. I think somebody here is going to need one.”

  “Cuff that asshole too,” said deLarava.

  CHAPTER 43

  “Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”

  —Lewis Carroll,

  Through the Looking-Glass

  A COUPLE OF DELARAVA’S men hustled the handcuffed attorney to a new Jeep Cherokee at the curb out front; three others opened the back of a parked truck and tossed about a thousand dollars’ worth of red and black cable coils and clattering black metal light doors out onto the street to make room for the rest of her captives: Kootie, Sullivan, Elizalde, the one-armed man, and Bradshaw. Sullivan noted that Johanna had eluded capture, and he wondered if Nicky had in some sense anticipated this, and sent her safely away; if so, Sullivan wished Nicky had conveyed his misgivings to the rest of them.

  A Plexiglas skylight cast a yellow glow over the interior of the truck. The captives were arranged along the truck’s right wall, with their cuffed wrists behind them; each pair of ankles was taped together and then taped at two-foot intervals onto a long piece of plywood one-by-six, which was then screwed into the metal floor with quick, shrill bursts of a Makita power screwdriver. The one-armed man wasn’t cuffed—deLarava’s men had simply taped his right arm to his body, with his hand down by his hipbone.

  And deLarava stayed in the back with the captives when the truck door was pulled shut, leaning against the opposite wall while her driver backed and filled out of the cul-de-sac and then made a tilting left turn onto what had to be Ocean Boulevard.

  “Nicky,” she said immediately, “remember that you’ve got an innocent woman and child in here with you. If you feel any kind of … psychic crisis coming on, I trust you’ll be considerate enough to let me know, so that my men can transfer you to a place where you won’t harm anyone.”

  “Nothing ever excites me when I’m awake,” said Bradshaw, who was slumped below some light stands up by the cab. “And I’m not feeling sleepy.”

  “Good.” She reached into the bosom of her flower-patterned dress and pulled out a little semiautomatic pistol, .22 or .25 caliber. “If anyone wants to scream,
” she said, sweeping her gaze back and forth over the heads of her captives, “this will put a fairly quick stop to it, understood?”

  “Lady,” said the one-armed man weakly, “I can help you. But I need to eat a ghost, bad. I just threw a couple of pounds of dead ectoplasm, and a good, ghost, and I’m about to expire.” He was sitting next to Sullivan, against the door, and each one of his wheezing breaths was like a Wagnerian chorus.

  deLarava’s mouth was pinched in a fastidious pout, but without looking down at him she asked, “Who are you, anyway?”

  The man was shaking, his right knee bumping Sullivan’s thigh. “Lately I’ve been calling myself Sherman Oaks.”

  “How can Sherman Oaks help me?”

  “I can … well, I can tell you that the boy there is carrying the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.”

  deLarava gave a hiccupping laugh. “That I already knew,” she said, greedily allowing herself to actually stare at Kootie.

  Sullivan looked angrily past Elizalde at Kootie. “Why in hell did you tell him how to unclog himself, anyway?”

  Kootie flinched, and said defensively, “Mr. Edison didn’t tell him exactly how. He—” Kootie choked and spat. “I can speak for myself, Kootie. He did more than what I told him, Pete. He kicked the rotted one out by throwing out a good one.”

  “After you told him the right … posture to assume,” said Sullivan.

  “Pete,” said Elizalde, “let it go, it’s done.”

  Meaning, Sullivan thought, don’t torment a senile old man who made a mistake out of wounded vanity.

  “What do you all mean by ‘unclogged’?” asked deLarava, still staring at Kootie.

  Sullivan looked up at her, and realized that Kootie and the one-armed man were looking at her too. This might conceivably be a bargaining chip, he thought.

  “When you suck in a ghost that has rotted in an opaque container,” said Sherman Oaks, “your ghost-digestion gets clogged. Impacted, blocked. You can’t eat any more of them, and the ghosts already inside you get rebellious. I was that way. Now I know how to get clear of it, how you can Heimlich yourself. Ptooie, you know?”

  “Could we refer to them as ‘essences’?” said deLarava stiffly. “And use the verb ‘enjoy’?”

  “Where are we going?” asked Elizalde in a flat voice.

  deLarava squinted at her as if noticing her for the first time. “Pete’s Mex gal! One of my boys tells me you’re the crazy psychiatrist who’s been on the news. We’re all going to the Queen Mary.”

  Sullivan’s leather jacket had been left back at the apartment, probably still balled up on the floor from having served as a pillow; and now through his thin shirt he felt fingers fumbling weakly at his left shoulder.

  He looked at the man next to him, surprised that Oaks could have freed his single arm from the tape—and he saw that Oaks’ hand wasn’t free, was in fact still strapped down against his right hip; but Oaks was hunched around toward Sullivan, as if miming the act of reaching toward him with the arm that wasn’t there.

  Breath hissed in through Sullivan’s teeth as he jerked away from Oaks in unthinking fright.

  “What—” snapped deLarava, convulsively switching her little pistol from one hand to the other, clearly startled by his sudden move. “What is it?”

  Sullivan realized that she hadn’t once looked directly at him, and that she apparently didn’t even want to speak his name. She plans to kill me at some point today, he thought; and because of that she’s too fastidious to acknowledge me.

  He turned back to look at Sherman Oaks, and the tiny eyes returned his gaze with no expression; but the man now sniffed deeply.

  You smell my father’s ghost, Sullivan thought. You know he’s in here with us.

  At least the phantom fingers had moved away from him. “My shoulders are cramping up something terrible,” Sullivan said, deliberately, still staring at Oaks. Have we got a deal? he thought into the little eyes. I won’t tell her you’ve got a “hand” free if you won’t tell her about the ghost.

  “Any discomfort is regretted,” said deLarava vaguely.

  Sullivan looked back at the old woman. She was blinking rapidly, and her eyes, again fixed on the wall over the captives’ heads, were bright with tears.

  “They could only find the thumb,” said deLarava hoarsely, looking right up at the skylight now. “Where are the hands?”

  “Lost in the Venice canals,” said Sullivan at once. “I tried to fish them out, but they dissolved in the salt water like … like Alka-Seltzer.” Jammed behind him, his left hand was digging in his hip pocket; all that was in there was his wallet—containing nothing but ID cards and a couple of twenty-dollar bills—and his pocket comb.

  “Why are we going to the Queen Mary?” asked Elizalde.

  “To enjoy—” began deLarava; but her hair abruptly sprang up into a disordered topknot, drawing startled gasps from Kootie and Elizalde. And deLarava began to sob quietly.

  Sullivan was aware of an itch in his right ear, but his father’s ghost didn’t say anything.

  The Jeep Cherokee was leading the procession, and when it turned left off Ocean onto Queen’s Way the two trucks followed.

  J. Francis Strube didn’t dare hunch around in his seat, for the man in back was presumably still holding a gun pointed at him, but he could peer out of the corners of his eyes. They had driven past the new Long Beach Convention Center on the left, and past Lincoln Park on the right, and now they were cruising downhill toward a vista of bright blue lagoons and sailboats and lawns and palm trees. Out across the mile-long expanse of the harbor he could see the black hull and the white upper decks of the Queen Mary shining in the early-morning sunlight.

  The car radio was tuned to some oldies rock station, and the driver was whistling along to the sad melody of Phil Ochs’s “Pleasures of the Harbor.”

  For the past five minutes Strube had been remembering how cautious Nicholas Bradshaw used to be, when Strube had worked for him in 1975—refusing to say where he lived, never giving out his home phone number, always taking different routes to and from the law office. Maybe, Strube thought unhappily, I should have taken his paranoia more seriously. Maybe I was a little careless today, in the way I blundered into this thing. “Are we actually going to the Queen Mary?” he asked in a humbled voice.

  The driver glanced at him in cheerful surprise. “You’ve never been on it? It’s great.”

  “I’ve been there,” Strube said, defensively in spite of everything. “I’ve had dinner at Sir Winston’s many times. I meant, are we really going there now.”

  “deLarava’s scheduled a shoot there today,” the driver said. “I understood you were to be interviewed, along with that Nicky Bradshaw fellow. He was the actor who played Spooky, the teenage ghost in that old show. You must have seen reruns. He’s to do some kind of dance, was my understanding.”

  Strube was squinting against his bewilderment as if it were a bright light. “But why am I handcuffed? Why all the guns?”

  The man chuckled, shaking his head at the lane markers unreeling ahead of him. “Oh, she can be a regular Von Stroheim, can’t she? What’s the word? Martinet? I mean, you wanna talk about domineering? Get outta here!”

  “But—what are you saying? What happened back there at that apartment building? You people threw all those wires and metal shutters out of the truck onto the street! And what was that awful smell?”

  “Ah, there you have me.”

  Strube was dizzy. “What if I try to get out, at the next red light? Would this man behind me shoot me?”

  “Through the back of the seat,” said the driver. “Don’t do it. This isn’t a bluff, no, if that’s what you’re asking. The new automatics are ramped and throated so they have no problem feeding hollow-points, and it might not even make an exit wound, but it would surely make a hash of your vital organs. You don’t want that. In fact—” He slapped the wheel lightly and nodded. “In fact, if Sir Winston’s is open for lunch, we might be able to get her
to spring for a good meal!”

  “Never happen,” said the man in the back seat gloomily.

  After they had been driving for about ten minutes, stopping and starting up again and making some slow turns, Sullivan felt the truck stop and then reverse slowly down a ramp; and the skylight went dark, and he could hear the truck’s engine echoing inside a big metallic room. Then the engine was switched off.

  Car doors chunked in the middle distance, and he could feel the shake of the truck’s driver’s-side door closing; footsteps scuffed across concrete to the truck’s back door, and the door was unlatched and swung open. The chilly air that swept into the truck’s interior smelled of oiled machinery and the sea.

  “E Deck,” called a young man who was pulling a wheeled stepladder across the floor of the wide white-painted garagelike chamber. “We chased off the ship’s staff for the moment, and we’ve got guys around to whistle if they come back. They say they’ve turned off the power in the circuit boxes on the Promenade and R Decks, and the gaffers are off to patch in and get the Genie lifts and the key lights set up for the first call at ten.”

  Test it with a meter anyway, thought Sullivan as his constricted left hand fingered his pocket comb. You don’t want to be hooking your dimmer-board to the lugs if somebody forgot, and there’s still a live 220 volts waiting for you in the utility panel.

  Behind the fright that was dewing his forehead and shallowing his breathing, he was vaguely irritated at his suspicion that these efficient-looking young men might be better at the job than he and Sukie had been.

  deLarava was still sniffling as she clumped heavily down from rung to rung of the stepladder. “Get a couple of runners to take … the kid, and the old guy up by the front, and Pete Sullivan, he’s the guy in the white shirt … to that room they’re letting us use as an office. Gag the woman and the one-armed guy and leave them where they are for now.”

  Sullivan looked at the one-armed man seated awkwardly beside him. Sherman Oaks seemed to be only semiconscious, and his breathing was a rattling, chattering whine, like a car engine with a lot of bad belts and bearings. But the fabric of the man’s baggy brown-and-green trousers was bunching and stretching over the left thigh, as if kneaded by an invisible hand.